In confrontations with armed groups like the Bundy supporters, local law enforcement matters most.

In 2012, Steve Martin sat in a briefing room at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico, listening to the details of a clandestine operation his agency was planning in the Nevada desert. The goal seemed commendable — to round up rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle, which had been grazing illegally on public land for decades — but the means seemed off to the Arizona-based special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management. It was full of optimistic bravado, he recalls, and it was missing a key ingredient: cooperation with the county sheriff. Says Martin: “I remember thinking, ‘Is this still the BLM?’ ”

Two years later, in April 2014, when BLM law enforcement officers finally descended on Bundy’s ranch at Bunkerville, Nevada, Martin, by then retired, wasn’t surprised by the outcome. Wielding tasers and police dogs, the agency’s law enforcement officers found themselves confronted by protesters who had gathered in defense of Bundy. A video of the incident, including the tasing by a BLM ranger of one of Bundy’s sons, went viral, and dozens of Oath Keepers and other militia types from around the country flocked to Bunkerville to take on the federal “jack-booted thugs.” The following day, a small line of flak-jacketed BLM rangers with assault rifles, backed up by similarly armed Park Service rangers, were strategically surrounded by the protesters, some pointing guns of their own. Local law enforcement officers were conspicuously absent until the standoff's final moments, when the sheriff helped negotiate a truce and the agency backed down.

Today, Bundy’s cattle remain on the range, and the federal government has not brought charges against the rancher. The defeat illustrates what Martin says he learned in his 24-year career with the BLM: Though the agency has bulked up its rangers with more modern equipment to handle the increasingly complex conflicts on public lands, it still has a surprisingly small and politically vulnerable presence on the Western range.

About 200 rangers — the term the BLM has always used to describe its field officers — enforce the agency’s regulations across the more than a quarter billion acres it manages in the West. That’s one ranger per an area bigger than the state of Delaware. Law enforcement veterans say that without significant backup support from local, state and other federal law enforcement, it can’t succeed in handling volatile conflicts like the one at Bunkerville, or the current standoff with armed protesters in eastern Oregon.

Before the Bundy showdown, the BLM had contacted the local sheriff for support, but, failing to secure it, decided to go it alone. “That’s an attitude that just can’t work at BLM,” Martin says.

Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officers block the Overton Beach Road at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Overton, Nevada on April 10, 2014. The shadows of people protesting the roundup of cattle owned by Cliven Bundy are seen in the foreground.

John Locher/Las Vegas Review-Journal

The BLM badged its first 13 rangers in 1978for a specific purpose: To rein in illegal off-road vehicles in the California desert. They took their name and their look — brown wool trousers and khaki shirts — from Park Service rangers, and carried only pistols. Even as the program expanded beyond California in the late ’80s, “everybody thought the rangers were about recreation management,” says Dennis McLane, who became a ranger in 1979 and would become the BLM’s first chief ranger in 1989. As the rangers trickled across the West, he says, they quickly confronted other crimes: archaeological looting, timber theft, illegal dumping.

But the agency rarely acted alone. Following the guidance of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which granted the agency law enforcement authority, but emphasized “maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement,” BLM rangers routinely cooperated with county sheriffs, says Ed Patrovsky, who in the early ’90s was the first ranger sent to patrol 3.2 million acres of BLM land in northwest Colorado. “Without that,” he says, “doing much of any work would have been very difficult,” because of how thinly spread the new force was. In the BLM’s first major standoff with protestors, the 1990 shutdown of the infamous off-road race between Barstow, California and Las Vegas, Nevada, the county sheriff played a key role, pursuing violators by helicopter.

As the West changed, so did the rangers. Bulging cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas pushed urban crime onto the public land. Off-roading in the California desert sometimes degenerated into drug- and alcohol-fueled riots with stabbings and other violent crime. “We were seeing more and more automatic weaponry,” says Cris Hartman, hired as a ranger in 1987 1984. She recalls a series of controversial equipment upgrades: shotguns in the ’80s; semi-automatic rifles in 1992; high-powered assault rifles in the early 2000s, after she’d left the BLM for the Forest Service, where she observed a similar pattern. Still, “the sheriffs were always ahead of us,” in terms of weaponry, she says.

The agency also added special agents, who specialize in long-term investigations, to its ranger corps. And it began hiring rangers who thought of themselves more like police officers. “We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, ‘Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-ass stuff going on here,’ ” says Martin.

The shift on the ground reflected structural changes from the top. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the agency peeled away the special agents from civilian field managers and put them under the command of a newly created director position, filled by Bill Woody, who had never worked for the BLM. The number of agents increased, sometimes drawn from the ranks of the FBI and other traditional law enforcement agencies. Today the agency has 75 agents, up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago, while the number of rangers has remained relatively steady.

The restructuring created “a faction within the agency,” says former BLM director Bob Abbey. “I think in many respects they have become a separate organization.”

It also magnified certain personalities, by giving more autonomy to special-agents-in-charge, who oversee consolidated regions. Martin is hesitant to use his name, but like many others critical of the direction that BLM law enforcement has taken, he clearly means Dan Love, the special-agent-in-charge for Utah and Nevada. Love spearheaded a series of busts of illegal artifact trading in southeast Utah in 2009. Locals cried federal overreach and were especially rankled when an informant and two of the alleged traders committed suicide. Love also presided over the inexplicable cancellation of cooperative agreements with sheriffs in several Utah counties. And he was the agent who briefed Martin and others in 2012, about the upcoming Bunkerville raid.

Has the BLM’s current leadership learned any lessons from Bunkerville? It’s hard to know because the agency has demonstrated a nearly total unwillingness to discuss it with High Country News, or any other news organization. But retirees like Martin and Patrovsky hope the incident will help spur the agency to restrengthen its partnerships with local sheriffs and reconsider its own limits.

“We know there are a lot of people out there who don’t like us,” says Martin. That’s why he speculates that the local sheriff, who Sagebrush Rebel-types tend to regard as the legitimate law of the land, may have been able to defuse the Bunkerville protest, had they been given the lead.

Rangers still have a simple, everyday mission to protect the public’s lands, and the BLM needs to promote that image, he says. In the past, “we weren’t Marshalls, we weren’t the FBI, ATF or DEA,” Martin says. “The public looked at us as rangers.”

Marshall Swearingen is a freelance reporter based in Bozeman, Montana.